


Final Flight

by lost_spook



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Airplane Crashes, Community: hc_bingo, Death, Disasters, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mortality, Trope Bingo Round 2, Trope Subversion/Inversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Time keeps a plane in flight, Sapphire and Steel have to ensure it falls…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Final Flight

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Hurt/Comfort Bingo square "Plane Crash" and Trope Bingo square "Deathfic".

They’re standing together on the ground, watching as the plane flies overhead, and the storm gathers around it – and then the plane vanishes, before the same moment is replayed again, and again.

“What happened?” he asks. He wants to know what caused the trouble: mechanical failure, human error, the violence of the storm, deliberate sabotage or any combination of those things.

Sapphire shakes her head. She thinks that’s irrelevant here.

“Are you sure?” It irritates him not to know, but if it’s outside of their business, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Something is using the storm and the human drama and emotion from the people on the plane to claw its way out through a break in the corridor. That’s unsurprising. But what is it drawing on? If it’s not the fault in the plane, then that’s what counts. Is it a group of humans who should already be dead – one hundred and seventy-four, Sapphire says – or who should now be flying onwards to their destination, alive and unhindered by the efforts of Time?

“Well?” asks Steel. He’s impatient at being this far away from the point of action.

Sapphire barely smiles at him. “The plane crashed, Steel. Here. Where we’re standing. There were no survivors. A hundred and seventy-four lives ended.”

“But it hasn’t,” he says, with a frown. “Not yet. It _will_ crash, you mean?”

“Has crashed,” she insists, and then looks skyward again, seeing what he can’t. “Fear. Denial. The overriding need to survive. It’s keeping it back, holding the moment – and there’s something there, something using that –”

Steel nods. “Yes.” Nearly two-hundred lives. That’s a significant impact. If it breaks the corridor, if the plane flies on, reality will fracture here. There will be an invisible fissure line through which even worse things will come. Time itself will bend, break, shatter. It may even be irreparable, and that’s not all: the consequences will continue outwards, with every action, every change each one of those people make.

“I don’t know if we can contain it, if –” she begins, thinking along the same lines. She shivers.

He doesn’t comment on the waste of it, the number of lives involved. “How?” he asks. It’s all that matters. The rest is commonplace. Humans are like this. They get complacent, careless with dangerous things, big or small. They play with technology they’d be better off leaving alone and think they can tame everything around them, think they’re invincible. They’re not. Maybe it’s carelessness that caused this, maybe it’s just another accident. It doesn’t matter.

“So much fear,” Sapphire says, in distress. “Fear. Shock. Denial. There’s a belief in their own immortality they have – _I can’t die_. Until they do. There’s so little time to take it in here and yet –”

“It’s enough,” Steel says, cutting in. “Enough time.” He and she both know it: how long they are, those crucial last seconds, micro-seconds, nano-seconds. Sometimes they contain lifetimes, even eternities.

Sapphire smiles then, but sadly, in acknowledgement. “Yes.”

“There must be a trigger, though,” he says, trying to draw her back to the point. “A focus point for all that collective fear, that emotion.”

She looks across at him, and he understands what she means. They need to be up there, to see for themselves. They need to see inside the plane in flight – in its final moments of flight.

“Can you do it?” he asks, suddenly harsh again. She must be able to: if they can’t stop it, then the saving of these lives is going to have a catastrophic effect. Or they’ll need to call in help, waste time – maybe it still won’t be soon enough. He doesn’t like either idea.

However, Sapphire nods, and then walks away from him, to stand on a patch of grass that looks no different to him than the rest of the field. It’s where it’s going to fall, he thinks, and then he corrects himself: where it already has fallen. She can take readings of it there, despite the interference of the storm, the humans – and _it_ , whatever it is, that is hiding in the storm above.

She looks back towards him, her eyes blazing blue, and he sees the plane, everyone sitting there on either side of a narrow aisle. They don’t know anything’s happening – some of them are nervous at the turbulence, others shifting about in the cramped seating spaces, reading books, talking, listening to music. What happens, the storm hitting, electrical failure, is almost too sudden, too abrupt to respond to before the cycle plays over again.

What is there in those few moments? Sapphire takes time back by six seconds: oxygen masks released, sudden and startled movements, disbelief turning to reality, edges of panic before it’s too late even for that –

There must be something, though. He frowns as he tries to find it; he knows she’s trying too. If there weren’t something, even the numbers involved wouldn’t bring this to the attention of Time. It’s not as if this is all that unusual. Humans are dying elsewhere, all over this planet right now: individual deaths, expected, unexpected; then there are car crashes, freak accidents, disease, poverty, murder. It happens. He clenches his fist and watches. There must be one small key detail that has drawn everything together here and they will find it.

Sapphire rewinds the scene again, with increased effort this time.

There’s somebody screaming, he realises, and it’s drawing everyone’s attention into a focal point at the last instant. One human, screaming and screaming while nearly everyone else is still too shocked to understand.

Sapphire’s already there with him. “Yes,” she says. “Yes.” 

Then they both look up again, and he demands that Sapphire take time back once more, this time with a difference: when it gets to that fatal moment, Sapphire forces events forward, jumping a track, and the plane drops from the air as the storm breaks and thunders above them.

 

There’s the wreckage of a plane on the ground, near to where they’re standing.

Sapphire walks around it, a lone living figure in a narrow blue dress and high heels. It isn’t safe to be so near, in human terms – there are flames; there could be further explosions if she can’t hold time back for long enough. It isn’t safe in their terms, either. There’s no guarantee the creature hiding in the storm is weak enough to let them snatch this prize away from it.

He’d rather leave already, but Sapphire must do what she needs to do, and so she walks on, reading the remains, recording each life lost, as the waves of disbelief and terror bleed through her to him. She speaks as she goes, sometimes aloud, sometimes to his mind, incidentally: a catalogue of lost individuals.

A man here, she says, forty-three. He was asleep, didn’t even know. She catches the last wisp of his dreams. Next, a child, a boy: nine years and six months and seven days. So confused. A woman, seventy-eight. She’d never flown before. It wasn’t as bad as she’d thought –

 _Sapphire_ , he says warily. He thinks this must be unnecessary now. He dislikes the distress it’s causing her, and there’s clearly no dangerous activity left here, after all. Once Sapphire lets time move again at its normal rate, the wreckage may well burn on and explode, but there’s nothing left of the external threat – what he knows is the real threat. 

She shakes her head, and continues, keeping her readings silent this time, but he catches something of them still, as the echoes of fear begin to merge together and become indistinguishable.

“I had to make certain,” she says, then. She’s suddenly at his side again. “No one escaped. For a moment, I wasn’t sure. But they’re all there.” She looks out at the field, and the knowledge she’s taken in ceases to be mere accounting to her, if it had been to start with. Then she turns away again, away from the pain, in towards him. He doesn’t hold her. There’s no need. He’s here beside her, sustaining her.

She’s still leaning against him. “Steel –” she says, and shivers.

“They will do it,” he says, roughly. “They don’t have to. They could have stayed on the ground.”

Sapphire picks up her head, and her mouth quirks into a slight smile; countering his argument with a raised eyebrow. “If they were meant to fly, they’d have grown wings?”

“I didn’t say that,” Steel returns in irritation, although it’s close enough, if he’s honest. Why all the vehicles, he wonders, all the added danger involved in all such devices? Why race to your death? It comes soon enough.

“Time wins, either way,” Sapphire says. “An event twisted out of its proper pattern, or so many lives cut short.”

“But, as you say, this is the pattern. This is only what had to happen, what always happened.” He reaches out a hand without looking, curls his fingers around hers, lightly. He understands, though: when it’s like this, it gives Time so much more of an opportunity. This shouldn’t happen, that’s what they think, as if it never had before, as if it comes as a surprise to them after all these centuries of the evidence plainly before them, the fact that every one of them dies in the end.

Sapphire straightens herself and gives a distant smile. “Yes. It is.”

It’s time to go, but he doesn’t need to say that to her. There’s no need for them to stay here, they’d only be in the way. So he kisses her forehead, as she tightens her grip on his hand in return, and they make their silent exit together this time.

 

There’s the wreckage of a plane lying in a field and a storm breaking overhead. There’s nothing else left, and that’s as it should be.


End file.
